Fangland: A Novel [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

John Marks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 2007

Robert, my love, there isn't much time. This will be my last communication, unless by some chance I survive...I have tried to report everything as it happened, so there can be no doubt about my veracity. I have to hurry or the sun will go down, and I will have to deal with this menace in the dark...He has some plan in New York, that's clear. He is a form of terrorist; but his terror is strange. It's like a virus, and I have it...He has put something terrible inside of me. Evangeline Harker, Associate Producer on television news magazine "The Hour", is sent to Transylvania to scout out a possible story on a notorious Eastern European crime boss named Ion Torgu. But she finds the true nature of Torgu's activities to be far more monstrous than she could have imagined. In the New York office that once stood in the shadow of the Twin Towers, Evangeline's disappearance causes uproar and a wave of guilt and recrimination. Then suddenly, months after her disappearance, she's found convalescing in a Transylvanian monastery, her memory seemingly scrubbed. But then who was sending e-mails in her name? And what do those crates delivered to the office contain? And why does the show's sound system appear to be infected with some strange aural virus? As a very dark Old-World atmosphere deepens in the halls of one of America's most trusted television programmes, its employees are forced to confront a threat beyond their wildest imaginings. Written in the form of diary entries, e-mails and therapy journals, "Fang Land" manages both to be a genuinely frightening vampire novel in the grand tradition and a biting commentary on the way we live and work now.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The unusually large cast that reads Marks's multiperspective, modern vampire story helps make up for the lack of special effects one might expect. There is no creepy music, no doors creaking or wind shrieking through the trees to augment the tale of what happens after Evangeline Harker, a lovely assistant producer of a venerable TV news show, travels to Romania to meet a fabled gangster. Her trip goes horribly wrong and soon her colleagues in New York are afflicted as well. Marks, a former 60 Minutes producer, is at his best when writing about the life of the newsroom, which we witness through the conversation and thoughts of people who are all concerned about Harker's disappearance and the horrors that have followed, but who observe each other and the rest of the show's staff with keen distrust and disdain. This reading adds little to the chilling story aside from the varied voices, yet as a novel take on the worn-out vampire story, with a steady drumbeat of macabre events alternating with dryly funny commentary, it is sure to hold listeners until the end.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist

Professional and personal aspirations collide when Evangeline, an ambitious associate producer of The Hour ("the most successful news show in American television history") accepts Robert's wedding proposal just before jetting off on an assignment she would rather dodge. Her uber-producer dismisses her protestations, so it's off to Transylvania to evaluate a possible story on Romanian reputed crime lord Ion Torgu. Marks' sense of place (a horse and wagon in front of a Coke sign symbolizes the transition from communism) and tone-setting emphasis on blood and bloodlines kick in early as Evangeline mulls over blending her Italian Irish heritage and Robert's mix of Creek Indian and the U.S. marshals who fought them, a union represented for her by the engagement ring she insists on wearing to meet the small, pale Torgu, who proves a kind of terrorist, and who infects her "like a virus" when she is abducted. She resurfaces months later, recuperating in Transylvania and recalling nothing. A scary twenty-first-century take on the stuff of Dracula, worthy of its rightful place among others. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (January 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159420117X
• ASIN: B00127SHRS
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,198,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Once, years ago in Belgrade, I met a beautiful blonde Serbian nationalist named Simonida, and we got to talking vampires. I knew from my own research that the vampire of American popular culture had its roots in Serbian folklore, and she offered to do more than confirm the truth. She asked me whether I'd like to meet a few vampires in person. I declined, but out of my cowardice, my latest novel Fangland was born. A few hundred kilometers to the west, the Bosnian war was unfolding, with images of violence and brutality that wouldn't have been out of place in a saga of the undead.


Aside from vampire-hunting, I've been a 60 Minutes producer and a Berlin bureau chief for US News & World Report. My books include three novels and one work of journalistic memoir, Reasons To Believe: One Man's Journey Among The Evangelicals and The Faith He Left Behind.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So you thought you knew all about vampires..., January 19, 2007

By 

Zoyd (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fangland: A Novel (Hardcover)

Well, think again! In this amazing, weird, genre-bending and -blending, different-from-any-other-book-you're-likely-to-read novel, you'll get to know a particularly nasty specimen. Forget the teeth - this vampire uses a saw and a bucket. But FANG LAND isn't only a smart and frankly terrifying retelling of Bram Stoker's classic (which it is indebted to on a structural level, too); Marks uses the foil of the vampire novel to say some pretty serious things about why our media suck. (Excuse the pun.) And he does so with a satirical edge that is all the sharper because he used to be a producer for 60 Minutes himself. A great read and more profound than you'd think. The cover is spectacular, too.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dracula updated!, May 18, 2007

By 

Jessica S. "Vamp Girl" (Missouri) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fangland: A Novel (Hardcover)

Fangland can basically be described as an updated Dracula. In fact the main character, a young woman is named Evangeline Harker, just like Stoker's classic Jonathan Harker. There are even a few names that are re-used as well. Evangeline is a reporter for a TV show called the Hour. She is sent to Romania to interview a possible crime lord named Ion Torgu, who presumes the role of Dracula. Although it is never said if he is truly a vampire, he is something else that is not of this world however.

Similar to Stoker's tale, Evangeline remains too long on her trip and doesn't return at the appointed time, but for some reason someone is taking over Evangeline's life and sending emails in her name and shipping strange crates back to the office. Evangeline loses her memory of the duration of the trip and when she returns home her memories slowly return to her and the terror of them drives her insane. A horror has taken over the people of the Hour and Evangeline must do all that she can to defeat the monster.

Overall a very good book. If you've read Stoker's classic Dracula you'll love this modern new twist. As mentioned before there are a few names that are similar if I'm remembering correctly. A must read for all Dracula fans, you won't be disappointed.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly "meh.", January 11, 2009

By 

Kara M. Graves "w0rdinista" (Palm Bay, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fangland (Paperback)

As a huge fan of the Stoker original, the premise of the novel intrigued me -- an updated "Dracula" story? Excellent! Gender-flipping the Harker character into a female lead? Great! Lots of high reviews on Amazon and other places? Clearly this must be the Holy Grail of vampire novels!

Sadly, not so.

The first half of the novel starts out well enough-- where Marks stays true to the Stoker original without being a complete carbon-copy. The modern adaptation concept worked really, really well. Marks updates the old epistolary format, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries using therapy journals and e-mail, and it's all really engaging.

Unfortunately, it all falls apart halfway through. For one, by avoiding all of the trappings of the vampire mythology, Torgu seems less and less like a vampire. In fact, by the end of the novel, I wasn't entirely convinced that Torgu WAS a vampire (in fact, when he DOES in fact drink blood, it seems like a total nonsequitur -- he collects it in a bucket after slashing the victim's throat, and then proceeds to cup it in his hands and drink it). He's essentially described as human suffering made manifest, and there is a distinct emphasis ON human suffering and the dead, but its significance never really clicks with the rest of the book.

The main character, Evangeline Harker, is completely unsympathetic -- we're never sure what kind of person Marks wants her to be, and eventually her behavior is nothing short of pointlessly erratic -- not a trait you want a protagonist to have.

For that matter, the cast of characters is far too large, and it not only becomes difficult to keep track of them all, it becomes impossible to care about any of them. (Besides that, most of them aren't likeable in the least, which makes it doubly difficult to give half a damn about them.)

The POV changes that some of the other reviewers complained about is consistent with Stoker's original, but what Marks fails to do with this tapestry of correspondance is make all the pieces fit together to create a coherent whole. Stoker's novel, while flawed in its own way, consisted of newspaper clippings, journal entries, and letters, that all fit together, like a mosaic, and when you stepped back, as a reader, you saw how the pieces fit and what kind of picture it made. Marks pays homage to the format without fully understanding it, it seems, and so it all falls horribly flat.

And as a personal pet-peeve: people simply do *not* talk the way Marks portrays, I don't care how worldly and well-educated they are. The dialogue is at times painful, and the winding monologues are best skipped over entirely.

In short? I wouldn't recommend it.